The Out Here Alone Pre-Alpha Demo has now been released as part of the r/SoloDevelopment Marathon Jam 3! You can download it here.

The Jam Goals

Our goal for the Marathon Jam was simple - release a demo that would give people a flavour of how the final game will look and feel. In that respect we were successful, however there were a few things that we just didn't have time for...

What We Missed

The main item that we just didn't have time for was finishing off all the rooms used in the procedurally generated derelict ships. While the rooms technically all exist, most of them are missing level assets or are overlapping in strange ways. We decided early on in the jam that the focus should be on completing and polishing the functionality and ensuring that the demo was playable from start to finish.

Of course, we intend to keep working on the demo and release a much more complete version soon! Keep an eye on the itch page for updates or follow the progress on Twitter.

What We Hit

Here's a full list of updates we completed during the jam:

• Full demo intro, outro, and vessel dialogue - including introducing the player to the game mechanics, explaining the lore, and various other things.
• Added alerts for when vessel hits certain damage thresholds.
• Added vessel destruction.
• Added the vessel's defense node, so the second player can shoot while the first player pilots.
• Added the warp crystal to derelict vessels, which can be used to power the warp gate.
• Fixed issue where the vessel's beam was colliding with the nodes.
• Fixed a major level generation issue where the vertical "connections" between level rows were missing collision.
• Fixed an issue where enemies in the derelict ship could spawn on top of each other and become stuck.
• Added random names for derelict vessels.
• Added quit game functionality.
• Prevented both players from using the same vessel node at once.
• Added node damage effects, including a destruction countdown when the core node is damaged.
• Fixed an issue where players could merge when one was already dead.
• Changed the split/merge functionality so only one player now needs to press the button.
• Combined all the various camera movement/controls into a single, manageable function.
• Fixed an issue where sensors blips and direction handler would appear in the wrong place on different screen resolutions.
• Reduced the size of the demo level to reduce travelling time.
• Fixed various audio bugs.
• Various polishing and bug fixing.